Anti-Dhimmitude: Likud MK Feiglin Demands Turkish Apology for 1942 Struma Slaughter

On the heels of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ill-advised, dhimmi-like apology to Turkey’s traditionalist Islamic Jew-hating, Sharia supremacist Prime Minister “Mas-Kom-Ya” Erdogan (under morally repugnant pressure from US President Obama), comes this refreshing  display of anti-dhimmitude by Likud MK Moshe Feiglin.

As reported by Israel Hayom, MK Feiglin (hat tip Sy Dill),

…[A] little more than a week after Israel apologized to Turkey over the May 2010 Gaza flotilla raid, …demanded on Sunday that Turkey apologize for the February 1942 sinking of the MV Struma in the Black Sea.

In The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, I highlight Bernard Wasserstein’s account of how  the Turkish government’s cruel, heinous behavior was primarily responsible for the deaths of 767 hapless Romanian Jewish refugees  from the Nazi rampages of the World War II era Holocaust.

Bernard Wasserstein recounted the horrible fate of 767 Jewish refugees from Romania escaping the Holocaust aboard The Struma—a rotting, 75 year-old yacht whose desperate human cargo was denied refuge by Turkey, when the vessel stalled at Istanbul: “It was a rough night in the Black Sea on February 24, 1942. Ten kilometers or so from the shore, a 75 year-old, 240-ton converted yacht, carrying 767 Jewish refugees from Romania, exploded, probably after being hit by a torpedo, fired in error by a Soviet submarine. The vessel sank with the loss of all except one of the passengers. The Struma had left Constanza [Romania] on December 12, 1941, bound for Palestine. But on arrival at Istanbul three days later, her engine broke down and she was unable to proceed. While engineers tried unsuccessfully to restore the ship to seaworthiness, the Turkish and British governments wrangled about the onward passage of the refugees. The Turks refused to allow them to land unless they had guarantees of admission to some other country. [emphasis added] The British refused to grant them certificates to enter Palestine. The failure of the two governments to agree culminated in the boat being towed out to sea and abandoned to the waves…The truth, in this instance was at least as discreditable to the Turks, who were in fact, informed of the British concession [whereby teenage children aboard the ship would, after all, be allowed to enter Palestine], but adamantly refused to allow the children to travel overland across Turkey to Palestine. [emphasis added] No ship was available to take them, and in the end they drowned with their families when the Struma founderedthe only force used in the episode was that applied by between one and two hundred Turkish policemen who overpowered resistance from the debilitated refugees and supervised the towing of the rotten, still engine-less hulk out beyond territorial waters. They then abandoned the passengers to near-certain death. [emphasis added]  Wasserstein’s broader discussion of Turkey’s wartime policies towards Jews concludes “…there is little in the Turkish record to boast about.”, and suggests the “nadir” was reached with the enactment (November, 1942) of the capital tax—a brutally discriminatory levy which targeted Jews, Dönmes (17th century Sabbatian Jewish converts to Islam), and the Christian minorities (Greeks and Armenians) in Turkey.

Feiglin, as Israel Hayom further reports,  after detailing the sinking of The Struma, concluded his  Facebook post (linked to his Twitter feed, and entitled “Demand for an apology from the Turks”), by stating,

The truth is that we don’t need an apology! And also not financial compensation. The Jewish people have a special skill. They know how to remember!

 

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